A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,49

son on occasion. He’s got hisself close to graduatin’,” he answered, letting the smoke out slowly. “My wife, well, we got divorced a few years back.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I never did get to thank you for helpin’ with the transfer, though,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.

We were both silent, having run out of manners.

“I’ll just get to it,” I finally said. “I’m not a cop anymore, but I’m working a case out of Florida that has to do with an insurance investigator named Frank McCane.”

I watched his eyes jump to mine without a movement of his head.

“I know he was a bull here for some time and your years overlapped some before he was, uh, dismissed. I was hoping you might tell me something about him.”

“Ol’ Milo,” he said, a grin coming to his face. “An insurance man, you say? Ain’t that a hoot.”

Moticker took another slow drag and smiled with a set of bad teeth.

“You’re familiar?”

“Oh, anybody who was around then is familiar with Milo,” he said, lowering his already soft voice. “Mean sombitch and king of the pound, too. But that’s a sore subject round here now, Mr. Freeman.”

“I can appreciate that. But the record isn’t too clear on his dismissal,” I said. “I need a sense of the man without going to someone who might have been a friend or might get back to him.”

This time Moticker’s pale eyes stayed on mine, the eyes of a man with nothing to lose, but also one who rarely came across the opportunity to gain anything close to payback.

“McCane ran every damn thing in here at one time,” he started. “He had a piece of the inside drug trade. He decided whose homemade buck got confiscated an’ whose got sold. He controlled the inventory coming in and out of concession.

“Anybody had money, he squeezed ’em. Anybody had anything, he dealt it. Didn’t matter what color or what kind. Pure mean and pure greedy, Mr. Freeman, that’s the sense of that man.”

Moticker finished the cigarette, carefully snubbed it out and put the butt in his pocket. He cut his eyes to the shop again.

“Milo was running the drug trade. Had other guards bringing the stuff in and then flushing the packages down the toilets before they came on the pound,” he started, barely whispering.

“He knew the pump station. Would plug the thing by flushing an inmate shirt at the same time. Then he’d order one of the cons down into the station to clear it. Guy would go through the shit while the shooters and assistant warden just watched him get down in there and he would stuff the drug packages in his pockets and then come up with the shirt.

“Hell, nobody was gonna frisk that boy all covered with stink, and he’d get sent to the showers and later pass the dope off to Milo for a cut.”

He refocused his eyes on the group of welders inside and seemed to reshelve the memory. “He was the kind of man who knew how to use people and still make them feel inferior,” he finally said.

“The kind of man who might be involved with murder for money?” I asked.

The inmate seemed to roll his answer around in his mouth for a while.

“Not by hisself,” he said. “Milo wouldn’t be that dumb.”

Moticker stood up and for the first time I could see a con’s deviousness in his face.

“They’d be hell to pay if that ol’ boy came back here as an inmate,” he said, a crooked grin playing at his lips. “Hell to pay.”

I could tell the possibility left him with a vision that could keep him warmly amused for a lot of boring nights on his bunk.

“One thing,” I said. “Why Milo?”

He looked quizzically at me.

“The nickname?”

“Oh, hell, that was his own,” he said. “Character out that old war movie Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder was the guy that was doin’ all the underhanded dealin’ getting’ hisself rich off the war. McCane loved that.”

We went back inside the shop and I shook his hand.

“Hope things work out,” he said, and I wished him the same.

21

I sat on the hood of my truck, waiting for twilight, second-guessing my trust, and shooting holes in my own plans.

I’d ground out the possibilities during the flight back from Georgia and wasn’t sure I hadn’t wasted a bunch of time and Billy’s money just to satisfy my need for logic. As the plane had lined up its approach several miles to the west